A friend spent this past New Year’s Eve in Paris. There he and his family, along with thousands of Parisians, celebrated the arrival of the new year at the Arc de Triomphe. He remarked how, as midnight approached, the images that lit the arch were counterpoint to the...

Recently a friend emailed me a photo of Christo’s art project The Gates, Central Park, New York. It is comprised of 7,305 of fabric ‘gates’ spanning the pathways of Central Park. As I closed the email, the image lingered and the words, "The Thousand Portals Project",...

Until now I’ve only made large outdoor portals. But for sometime a good friend of mine asked me to make a much smaller gate. One that could sit on his desktop. With my existing tooling and by temperament I’m not inclined to making small objects. However, when I finished my last commission this summer and no others were on the immediate horizon, I wondered what to do next. It was quite obvious a miniature Elven Gate.

We can create “magical places”. Where there is artistry and creative design we are uplifted by the beauty that we encounter. Beautiful architecture or sculpture enhance our spirit and we are positively affected by our surroundings. Such places stimulate our imagination and creativity. There is magic in the intangible ambiance surrounds them. A quality that we feel when we enter such a place.